Ensure product & process hygienic conditions

When it comes to hygiene, corrosion resistance and clean requirements, the packaging industry does not compromise.

Food, beverage or pharmaceutical manufacturers must all ensure that their packaging process is not a potential source of contamination. Achieving maximum hygiene and safety conditions for products is a common demand, even more so when taking into account that international bodies such as FDA are increasingly legislating around this issue.

For processes like ingredient handling & heating, cleaning & wash down, filling, sealing & capping, which are very sensitive to sanitary conditions, we count on a range of solutions that:

• Meet packaging laws and regulations
• Are made of approved and enduring materials
• Are resistant to cleaning agents

In short, our range complies with the highest safety standards your processes demand.

See below how we can contribute to ensure product & process hygienic conditions:

Guarantee final product quality

Static electricity is an invisible phenomenon, with very visible, and costly effects. In packaging, one of the most damaging ones could be the rejection of the final product for not complying with quality standards (e.g. product contamination).

From our experience, your process might also be suffering from:

• Degraded workability
• Adhesion of foreign particles such as dust
• Electrostatic breakdown of electric parts
• Labels misalignment or not properly placed
• Machine operatives receiving static electrical shocks
• Heat is generated in the processes causing possible fire risks
• Difficulties in separating impurities

Fortunately, eliminating static and guaranteeing process & product quality is rather simple.

At SMC, we count on a wide range of ionizers for almost any packaging application, such as shrink packaging, transportation & conveying, labelling, boxing, casing and cartoning.

With the support of our experienced technical teams, we will help to ensure a perfect electrostatic balance.

These are our solutions to guarantee final product quality:

Keep up your productivity

Productivity, productivity, productivity. This is one of the most tuned melodies in the Packaging industry.

Furthermore, dealing with systems that must handle thousands of units per hour, such as box erectors, conveyors and handling robots, is indeed quite demanding. Lines where any unpredicted minimal stop translates directly into considerable economical losses.

To this end, not only do our solutions provide your application with high speed to keep up, but also with reliability to avoid system shutdown and any overall downtime.

For example, SMC’s high-speed and standard metal seal solutions will keep up with your productivity requirements while keeping maintenance time down to a minimum.

For robot applications, we’ve got our J Cylinders. Their special feature, is that they are more much compact and much lighter; with a reduced footprint that will improve the cycle time of your robots.

We present you with our high-speed guarantors to keep up your productivity:

Achieve the Smart Flexibility your customers demand

Smart factories need to offer tailor-made products at affordable prices without compromising quality. This now places the production process on a secondary level. Machines tend to integrate intelligent and modules easily adaptable to changes for highly flexible production, together with e-Maintenance to smartly support the complete life cycle of the product.

How do Industry 4.0, Smart factories, Digitization, you name it, interact with the Packaging industry? For starters, new technologies are the key for developing individual packaging and the special formats that are demanded by the consumers.

SMC’s contribution is:

• Format adjustments, with changes in guide rails, sidebands or link chains, are a reality with our complete range of electric actuators and controllers which offer high-speed production together with fast and flexible format change capabilities
• Our high-capacity and speed-networking solutions offer you a high degree of access to and feedback from automation components via condition monitoring
• IO-Link solutions let you minimise the overall setting control time, thus increasing machine availability
• Last but not least, our unique in the market wireless solution that offers cutting edge communication and freedom of movement for the packing industry.

More Smart Flexibility for smart & flexible packaging solutions below.

Operate smoothly in micro-powder environments

The use of robots for packaging applications is on the rise and they are included in applications in food and beverage, pharmaceutical and medical device industries. In these industries the products reach a point in the production process where they are picked, packed and palletised. At this point, robots manipulate cardboard sheets, cardboard crates or place heavy stacks of boxes on conveyor belts for them to be palletised.

These processes have shown that a significant amount of dust, both airborne and on flat surfaces, is created causing numerous problems for the equipment. To avoid such damage, at SMC we have focused on environmentally-resistant products. We offer different types of protection for them to be capable of smoothly operating in micro-powder (10 to 100 μm) and general environments.

Explore our solutions below to operate smoothly in micro-powder environments: